A few hours after filing a complaint with the World Trade Organization about China’s duties on American car exports, President Obama last week told an Ohio crowd that “Americans aren’t afraid to compete”.

If you’re interested in the slippery notion of free trade, read Zach Carter and Sabrina Siddiqui’s fascinating piece on the Obama administration’s attitude toward the international pharmaceutical market. India’s government, rather than leaving its citizens to pay $5,000 a month for the cancer drug Nexavar, opted to allow a local company to produce a generic version of it, which costs $157 per month. India’s actions, according to recent testimony from US Patent and Trademark Office Deputy Director Teresa Stanek Rea, were an “egregious” violation of WTO trade rules.

The only problem with that contention, Carter and Siddiqui report, is that this “compulsory licensing” is one of the WTO-sanctioned ways countries offer versions of drugs like Nexavar to their citizens. Indeed, they add, the US uses the same technique. Strangest of all, Bayer, which owns the patent on Nexavar, isn’t even an American company:

Rea and others at the briefing also failed to note that Bayer is a German company. During a lengthy discussion of the Obama administration’s efforts to prevent the Indian government from providing affordable medication to its citizens, Rea declared, “We are doing everything we can to respect the rights of U.S. innovators.” But she didn’t mention that her efforts weren’t actually supporting an American corporation.

That’s the “spaghetti bowl effect” of bilateral trade negotiations for you: It’s so incredibly recondite that it almost never makes any sense when viewed dispassionately from the outside. – Ryan McCarthy

LIEBOR
Bob Diamond could lose out on $31 million in compensation over the LIBOR scandal – DealBook
We’d really like to know what happened at the NY Fed’s 2008 meeting on “Fixing LIBOR” – Reuters
LIBOR-fixing may have cost muni issuers tens of millions of dollars – Bond Buyer

Self-Harm
“It has become transparently clear that the central bank has failed to take the actions its own principles demand” – Bloomberg View
President of the St. Louis Fed: Current Fed policy is “appropriately calibrated” – WSJ